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Forests are incredible. Just imagine the design brief for a tree - create something that makes oxygen, absorbs carbon, fixes nitrogen, distils water, stores solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates micro climates, changes colours with the season and self replicates. Brilliant - who could have designed that? Now let’s chop them down and turn them into dunny paper. Genius!

MYTHS

This is the short list: 20 years after they've logged a forest, it's all back to normal again; forests cause bushfires; wood-chips are made from the waste on the forest floor that saw-millers can't use; forests are bad for global warming because they absorb the sun’s energy; if we stopped logging native forests there'd be terrible job losses; fast-growing young forests absorb more carbon and are better for the climate that slow-growing old forests; Australia's native forests are managed on a sustainable basis; governments care more about forests than money.

FACTS

Trees are the lungs of the Earth. They absorb carbon dioxide (the stuff that we are producing in excess of what the planet can handle, which is now overheating the earth) during their lives and produce oxygen (the good stuff that we breathe). Trees provide habitat, food and shelter for millions of species. They also prevent erosion and moderate ground temperatures.

The bad news for New South Wales is that since European settlement we’ve been very busy clearing forests; 1788, at least 61% of the original native vegetation of NSW has been cleared, thinned or significantly disturbed.

The NSW Government has recently created legislation to stop logging on public land. Great! But it seems they have been forgetting that these laws and have recently went about illegally logging almost 20,000 hectares of listed red river gum wetlands in the Riverina.

When our old growth forests are logged they will take up to 1000 years to return to their original state. Hollows in gum trees take around 100 years to form. These hollows provide nesting opportunities for native birds and mammals. The current practice of total removal of all trees in old growth forests moves more species closer to extinction.

Old growth forests also provide the most valuable carbon sinks in New South Wales. They can store up to 640 tonnes of carbon for every acre. This has meant that 168 million tonnes of greenhouse emissions have been caused from deforestation since 1989. This is the equivalent to 16-times the current annual emissions from all of Australia's passenger vehicles.

What’s worse, it is estimated that 95% of red gum that is logged in NSW is used for very low value products such as fence posts, railway sleepers and firewood. Most of the sleepers go to Victoria. What a waste.

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